He stood up, walked to his office door, and pulled it open.
"Xiaochu, come here for a moment."
The academic affairs assistant, Xiaochu, quickly put down the files in his hands and hurried over.
"Dean Fang, what is it?"
"Look someone up in the faculty and staff system."
Alchemist handed him the slip of paper.
"Chen Zhuo, or a homophone. Check the math and physics departments. See if there are any new star returnees from overseas, or maybe some old professor who’s always kept a low profile, or one who’s retired."
Xiaochu took the note, walked quickly to the computer in the outer office, opened the school’s administrative backend, and accessed the faculty and staff archives.
A few taps on the keyboard.
The page refreshed.
"Dean Fang."
Xiaochu looked at the screen.
"There’s a Chen Yuanwen in the physics department who works in solid-state physics. The math department has no professors with the surname Chen. Among all the faculty and staff, the only other person whose name matches that pinyin is an old worker in the logistics department who tends the boilers. His name is Chen Dazhuo."
Alchemist stood behind Xiaochu, his brows knitted together.
A boiler operator obviously wasn’t the one solving equations for Princeton.
’Could it be a visiting professor?’
Alchemist wondered.
"Check the postdoctoral stations and the doctoral student lists. Maybe it’s a brilliant student who borrowed his advisor’s ideas?"
Xiaochu nodded and switched databases.
Postdocs: zero records.
Doctoral students: zero records.
In the master’s student list, there were two people named Chen Zhuo, but one was in the chemistry department and the other was in polymer materials. Neither had anything to do with theoretical physics.
The office fell silent.
"Dean Fang, is it possible the United States side made a mistake?" Xiaochu asked tentatively. "Could it be someone from another school who just happened to use our campus network email?"
"Delian wouldn’t joke about something like this."
Alchemist’s expression was grave.
"He made a special transoceanic call just to find this person. That means this person’s skill has completely won him over, and you can’t fake an email domain."
Xiaochu scratched his head.
"Then... the only thing left is the undergraduate system. But how could an undergraduate..."
An undergraduate optimizing a Princeton model?
That would be like a first-grader who just learned that one plus one equals two casually making a huge leap forward on the Goldbach conjecture.
"Search."
Alchemist uttered a single word. No matter how absurd it was, after the process of elimination, this was the only option left.
Xiaochu sighed and opened the undergraduate student records management system.
He typed in the pinyin.
He pressed the enter key.
The old computer’s hard drive made a series of whirring and clicking sounds as it read the data.
Two seconds later, the screen flashed white, and then a single line of data popped up.
Just that one.
Xiaochu’s gaze fell on the screen, his hand still frozen on the mouse. He said nothing.
Standing behind him, Alchemist saw the information as well.
Name: Chen Zhuo.
Department: School for the Gifted Young (Class of ’02, Interdisciplinary Studies).
Date of Birth: October 1991.
Beside it, a blue-backgrounded ID photo slowly loaded.
The photo showed a boy with a calm gaze. He was wearing a shirt with a slightly oversized collar, and his hair was cut very short. He looked like a middle schooler who hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet.
Xiaochu opened his mouth, his throat feeling a little dry.
He turned to look at Alchemist and saw that the normally stern vice dean was now staring intently at the screen.
Born in 1991.
He would only turn eleven after the New Year.
He, having just enrolled this year, had finished his first semester’s final exams half a month ago.
Delian’s exact words from the phone call replayed endlessly in Alchemist’s mind.
"Extremely, extremely impressive."
"A work of art."
’An eleven-year-old kid, from across the Pacific Ocean, used two pages of paper to hand a professor at Princeton the key to unlock an impossible knot?’
"Dean Fang..."
Xiaochu’s voice trembled as he pointed at the screen.
"Is... is it him?"
Alchemist didn’t answer.
He reached out, steadied himself on the back of the chair, and took a deep breath.
He had taught his whole life and seen plenty of prodigies. The School for the Gifted Young was never short of monsters.
But he had never seen a monster like this, one who completely shattered all common sense.
"Pull up his file," Alchemist’s voice was a little hoarse. "Look up his family’s contact information. It’s winter break now, so he must have gone home."
Xiaochu fumbled with the mouse and clicked open Chen Zhuo’s detailed file.
Home Address: Sunshine Family Courtyard, First Mechanical Factory, Zeyang City, Su Province.
"Make the call."
Alchemist said without hesitation.
"Use my desk phone."
「At the same time.」
Zeyang, Southside Agricultural Wholesale Market.
With New Year’s Eve approaching, there was barely any room to stand in the market.
The air was thick with the coppery smell of raw pork, the greasy smoke of fried hairtail fish, and the stench of cigarettes.
Several large speakers hanging high overhead were blasting Andy Lau’s "Gong Xi Fa Cai" on a loop.
In front of a stall selling Spring Festival couplets, red paper was strewn all over the ground, getting trampled underfoot.
Liu Xiuying was standing in front of a butcher’s stall.
Half a freshly slaughtered pig lay on the butcher block. The owner, a burly man, was shirtless save for a greasy apron, and he held a sharp boning knife in his hand.
"Boss, how much for this pork leg?"
Liu Xiuying critically examined a piece of skin-on pork.
"Twelve a pound, ma’am. Look at this fat, look at this color. Just hauled it in from the countryside this morning."
The owner rapped the back of his knife against the butcher block.
"Too expensive. The stall up front is only selling it for eleven-fifty."
Liu Xiuying unceremoniously tossed the meat back onto the block.
"Besides, this meat feels all wet. You inject it with water?"
"Hey, come on, ma’am! You’re wronging an honest man!"
The owner got agitated and pointed at the meat with the tip of his knife.

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